Dark Angel

by V. C. Andrews

  As I pressed against Troy's side, Tony smiled in the oddest kind of way. "I suppose I'll just be wasting my breath if I object, and say Heaven is too young, and her background too different to make you a suitable wife."

  "That's correct," said Troy staunchly. "Before the leaves of autumn fall to the ground, Heavenly and I will be on our way to Greece."

  Again my heart skipped. Troy and I had only talked vaguely about a honeymoon. I had thought of some local resort where we could spend a few days, and then on to Radcliffe, where I would study English. And soon, much to my amazement, all three of us were seated on a long leather couch, making plans for the wedding. Not for one minute did I believe he was going to let that marriage occur, especially when he smiled at me time and again.

  "By the way, my dear," Tony said to me pleasantly, "Winterhaven has forwarded to you a few letters without return addresses."

  The only person who wrote me was Tom.

  "Now we must send for Jillian and give her your good news." Was that sarcasm behind his smile? I couldn't tell, for Tony was not someone I could read.

  "Thank you for accepting this so well, Tony. Especially after your reports of how I behaved when you told me about your upcoming marriage to Jillian."

  At that moment Jillian sauntered into the room and fell gracefully into a chair. "What's this I hear . . . someone getting married?"

  "Troy and Heaven," explained Tony, turning hard eyes on his wife, as if ordering her to say nothing to alarm either one of us, "Isn't this wonderful news to hear at the end of a perfect summer day?"

  She said nothing, nothing at all. She turned those cornflower blue eyes on me, and they were blank, totally, alarmingly blank.

  The wedding plans and guest lists were made that very evening, leaving me speechless with the swiftness of Tony's and Jillian's acceptance of a situation I had believed neither would allow to happen. By the time Troy and I kissed good night in the front foyer, we were both overwhelmed by the pace of Tony's plans. "Isn't Tony wonderful?" he asked. "I truly believed he'd have all sorts of objections, and he had none. All my life he's tried to give me everything I wanted."

  I undressed in a daze before I remembered the two letters that Tony had put on my small desk. Both letters were from Tom, who had heard from Fanny.

  "She's living in some cheap rooming house in Nashville, and wants me to write to you for money. You can bet she'd call you herself, but it seems she lost her address book, and she's never had the kind of memory to retain numbers, you know that. Besides, she keeps in touch with Pa, begging him to send money. I didn't want to give Fanny your address again without your permission. She could ruin everything for you, Heavenly, I know she could. She wants part of what you've got, and will do anything to get it, for it seems she went through that ten thousand the Wises gave her in short order." It was just what I'd feared most; Fanny didn't know one thing about handling money.

  His next letter gave even more disturbing news. "I don't think be going on to college, Heavenly. Without you beside me urging me on, I just don't have the will or the desire to keep on studying. Pa's doing pretty good financially, and he never even finished grade school, so I've been thinking I'd go into his business and get married one day when I meet the right girl. It was just a joke to please you, that talk of being president of our country. Nobody would ever vote for a guy like me, with a hillbilly accent." And not one word to even hint at just what business Pa was involved in!

  Three times I read over Tom's two letters. Everything wonderful was happening to me, and Tom was stuck down there in some hick town in south Georgia, giving up his dreams of becoming someone important . . . it wasn't right or fair. I couldn't believe Pa could ever be successful in any really important way. Why, I'd heard Pa say he'd never read a book through to the end, and adding a string of figures had taken him hours. What kind of work could he do that would pay well? Tom was sacrificing himself in order to help Pa! That's the conclusion I reached.

  Again I raced through the moonlit, crooked paths of the maze, startling Troy out of sleep when I called his name.

  He came out of dreams looking boyishly confused before he smiled. "How nice that you've come," he said sleepily.

  "I'm sorry to wake you up, but I couldn't wait for morning." Switching on his bedside lamp, I handed him Tom-s two letters. please read these, then tell me what you think."

  In seconds he finished both letters. "I see nothing alarming enough to put that desperate look on your face. All we have to do is send your sister the money she needs, and we can help Tom in that way, too."

  "Tom won't take money from you, or from me. Fanny will, of course. But it's Tom I am most worried about. I don't want Tom stuck down there doing whatever Pa is, giving up his life in order to help Pa support his new family.

  "Troy," I said, daring to disappoint him with my plan. "I must go visit my family before our wedding." I grabbed his hands and kissed them over and over again. "Do you understand, darling? I'm so happy, my life is so good, I must do something to help them before I begin my wonderful new life with you. I know I can help both of them, just by visiting them, showing them I still care, showing them they can always count on me. And they can, can't they, Troy? You won't mind if my family comes to visit us after we're married, will you? You'll welcome them into our home, won't you?" With pleading eyes I waited for him to reply.

  Troy pulled my hands that grasped his, and brought me down on top of him on the bed. "I've been waiting to tell you my news, Heaven, for several days. I hope you'll forgive me for postponing it, but I couldn't bear for our idyll to come to an end and I knew as soon as I told you that you'd rush off." He kissed me again and again before he smiled and continued: "I've heard from the attorneys. Darling, I have such good news for you. Now you'll be able to visit your entire family, for we have found Lester Rawlings! He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and is the father of two adopted children named Keith and Jane!"

  It was difficult to breathe, not to be drowned by everything that was happening so fast.

  "It's all right, all right," Troy soothed as I began to cry. "There's plenty of time before our wedding for you to set everything straight. I'll be happy to go with you to visit the Rawlingses and to see your younger brother and younger sister; we can then decide just what action you want to take, if any."

  "They're mine!" I cried out unreasonably. "I have to have them under my roof again!"

  Again he kissed me. "Decide later what to do. And after we've seen Keith and Our Jane we will travel on to visit your brother and father, and finish our trip by visiting Fanny, and in the meanwhile, let's telegraph Fanny a few thousand dollars to see her over until we arrive."

  Unfortunately, it wasn't to be that way.

  While I slept safe and secure in my

  Farthinggale Manor bed, thinking now that Troy and I should deny our passion until we were married, Troy fell into deep sleep with all of his bedroom windows open. And a terrible northeaster swept in to blast us with rain, hail, and blustery winds. The worst of the wind and rain didn't waken me until six in the morning. I looked out of my bedroom windows to see the devastation of the perfect lawns, now littered with uprooted trees, broken branches, and other debris. And when I ran to Troy's cottage, I found him feverish and congested, barely able to breathe.

  I was truly terrified as I called Tony and an ambulance came to rush Troy to the hospital. Just when he was supposed to be the most happy, he had fallen deathly ill with pneumonia. Had he somehow brought it on purposely, unable to accept the love and happiness he deserved? I would not let this happen again. When we were married, I would be there always to protect him from his worst fears, which now seemed to have a way of making themselves come true.

  "It's what I want," whispered Troy from his hospital bed, days later. "The worst of my pneumonia is over, and I know you are anxious to see Keith and Our Jane again. There's no need for you to hang around while I recover my strength. By the time you are back, I'll be totally well."

  I didn
't want to leave him, even though he had the best of care, with private-duty nurses around the clock, and time and again I protested. Still, he kept insisting I should have what I'd wanted for so long, my chance to see Keith and Our Jane again. And as he urged me, and assured me he'd be fine, something kept insisting that I hurry, hurry, before it was too late.

  "You're leaving him?" Tony shouted, when I told him I was planning a short trip. I didn't want to tell Tony the truth about where I was going, fearing he'd try to stop me. "Now, when he needs you, you are shopping in New York for a trousseau? What kind of idiocy is that? Heaven, I thought you loved my brother! You promised me you would be his salvation!"

  "I do love him, I do, but Troy is insisting I go ahead with our wedding preparations. And he's out of danger now, isn't he?"

  "Out of danger?" Tony repeated dully, "No, he will never be out of danger until the day his first son is born, and maybe then he can give up his belief that he will not live long enough to reproduce himself."

  "You love him," I whispered, awed by the pain I saw in his blue eyes, "really love him."

  "Yes, I love him. He's been my responsibility and my burden to carry since I was seventeen years old. I have done everything I can to give my brother the best life possible. I married Jillian, who was twenty years older, though she lied to me about her age and said she was thirty, not forty. I believed with boyish naivete that she was what she pretended to be at that time--the sweetest, kindest, most wonderful woman in the world. Only later did I find out that she disliked Troy on first sight. But by that time it was far too late to change my mind, for I had fallen in love, stupidly, madly, insanely in love."

  His head bowed down into the cradle of his hands. "Go on, Heaven, do what you feel you have to, for in the end you will anyway. But remember this, if you hope to marry Troy, you hurry back and don't bring with you even one member of your hillbilly family." His face lifted to show me the knowing look in his eyes. "Yes, silly girl, I know everything, and no, Troy did not tell me. I am not gullible or stupid." He smiled at me again, devilishly mocking. "And what is more, dear child, I was aware all the time that you were slipping through the maze to visit my brother."

  "But . . but," I stammered, gone confused, awkward, and embarrassed, "why didn't you put a stop to it?"

  A cynical smile quirked his lips. "Forbidden fruit is the most compelling. I had a wild hope that in you, someone totally different from any girl or woman he'd met before, someone sweet, fresh, and

  exceptionally beautiful, Troy would find, at last, a good reason for living."

  "You planned for us to fall in love?" I asked, astonished.

  "I had hopes, that's all," he said simply, appearing for the first time totally honest and sincere. "Troy is like the son I can never have. He is my heir, the one who will inherit the Tatterton fortune and carry on the family tradition. Through him and his children I hope to have the family Jillian couldn't give me."

  "But you are not too old!" I cried.

  He winced. "Are you suggesting I divorce your grandmother and marry a younger woman? I would if I could, believe me, I would. But you can sometimes trap yourself so deeply there is no way out. I am the keeper of a woman obsessed by her desire to stay young, and I have feeling enough for her not to shove her out into the world where she wouldn't survive two weeks without my support." Heavily he sighed. "So go on, girl. Just make sure you come back, for if you don't, what happens to Troy will give you such terrible guilt to carry for the rest of your life, you may never be happy again."

  Fourteen Winners and Losers

  . THE SECOND FLIGHT OF MY LIFE TOOK ME FROM Boston's Logan Airport to New York City, and there I changed planes and headed straight to Washington, D.C. My veneer of sophistication was pitifully thin. I wanted to appear cool and controlled while underneath I was ridden by anxiety, terrified of doing everything wrong. The bustling activity of LaGuardia confused me. I had hardly reached my gate when passengers began to board. I wanted a window seat and was grateful when a young businessman eagerly stood up and offered me his. Soon I found out there was a price to pay for the seat, for he plied me with too many questions, wanting me to meet him later, and share a drink, and keep him from being lonely. "I'm on my way to meet my husband," I said in a cool, forbidding voice, "and I don't drink." Shortly after that, he abandoned his seat and found another unaccompanied young woman to sit beside. I felt much older than I had when I flew away from West Virginia last September.

  From September to August, not quite a year, had graduated high school, been accepted to college, and found a man to love, a man who really needed me, who didn't pity me as Logan had. I looked around at the other passengers, most of whom were dressed far more casually than I was in my pale blue summer pants suit that had cost more than the Casteels used to spend on a year's supply of food.

  High above the ground, with only the billowing white clouds to see, I felt the strangest sensation of waking from an enchanted sleep that had begun the day I arrived at Farthinggale Manor. This was the real world, where sixty-one-year-old women didn't appear to be thirty. No one looked fastidious and impeccably elegant, even those seated with me in the first class section. Babies were crying back in the tourist section. And for the very first time I realized that not once since I entered Farthinggale Manor had I really left its influence. Even at Winterhaven its tentacles had reached out 4o let me know who was in full control of my life. I closed my eyes and thought of Troy, silently praying for his swift recovery. Had Troy spent too much of his life in that huge house, where the invention and selling of make-believe dominated? For now that I was away from the influence of Farthy, his cottage beyond the maze seemed but an extension of what could seem to some a make-believe castle.

  When I arrived in Baltimore, I felt grateful to Tony, who had called to make hotel reservations for me.

  So this was not truly an unmapped quest. Not when a limousine with a driver waited for me. Even on this journey to find my long lost brother and sister, the control and influence of Farthinggale Manor still pulled the strings of Heaven Leigh Casteel.

  "You will have to make your own arrangements for visiting the Rawlingses," Tony had warned early this morning, "and I anticipate you are going to meet with a great deal of resentment from two parents who won't want you bringing back the past to children who may have adjusted to their new lifestyle very well. And you must keep remembering that you are one of us now, no longer a Casteel."

  I would always be a Casteel; I knew this even as I pulled in my breath, rose from my luncheon table, and made my way to a telephone booth. In my mind I had pictures of just how it would be. Keith and Our Jane would be thrilled to see me again.

  Hev-lee, Hev-lee, Our Jane would shriek, her pretty, small face lit up with happiness. She'd then race into my welcoming arms and cry from the relief of knowing I still cared and wanted her.

  Behind her would come Keith, much slower and shyer, but he'd know me. He'd be thrilled and happy, too.

  Beyond that I couldn't plan. The legal fight to take Keith and Our Jane from those substitute parents would take years perhaps, according to what the Tatterton attorneys had said, and Tony didn't want me to win. "It won't be fair to Troy to saddle him with two children who may resent him, and you know how sensitive he is. When you are his wife, devote yourself to him, and the children he will father."

  Holding the receiver tight to my ear, I grew nervous and apprehensive as the telephone rang and rang. What if they had gone on vacation? Breathlessly I let their phone ring and ring, waiting for someone to respond. I waited for the swept voice of Our Jane. I didn't expect Keith to respond to a telephone, not that is, if he was still the reticent little boy I used to know so well.

  Three times I called the number Troy had given me, and no one was home. I ordered another slice of blueberry pie to remind me of the pies that Granny used to make on rare occasions, and sipped my third cup of coffee.

  At three o'clock I left the restaurant. An elevator took me to the fifteenth floor
of the magnificent hotel, the very kind of posh hotel that Tom and I used to dream about when we lay on mountain slopes and planned our exceptional futures. I was planning to stay in Baltimore only over the weekend, and yet Tony had thought it absolutely necessary that I have a suite of rooms instead of only one. There was a pretty sitting room, and adjoining that, a fully equipped small kitchen where everything was black and white and very shiny.

  Hours passed. It was ten o'clock when I gave up on the Rawlingses, and put in a call to Troy.

  "Now, now," he soothed, "perhaps they took the children on a special outing that lasts all day, and tomorrow they will be home. Of course I'm all right. In fact, for the first time I'm really excited by the future, and all it holds for both of us. I have been a fool, darling, haven't I? Believing that fate planned, even before I was born, to kill me before I reached the age of twenty-five. Thank God you came into my life when you did, just in time to save me from myself."

  Dreams of Troy filled my sleep with

  restlessness. Time and again he shrank to child size, and drifted away from me, calling out as Keith used to do, "Hev-lee, Hev-lee!"

  I was up early the next day, impatiently waiting for eight o'clock. And this time when I called, a woman's voice answered. "Mrs. Lester Rawlings, please." "Who is calling?"

  I gave her my name, saying I wanted to visit my brother and sister, Keith and Jane Casteel. Her sharp intake of breath communicated her shock. "Oh, no!" she whispered, then I heard the click of her phone. I was left with the dial tone. Immediately I called her back.

  On and on the phone rang, until Rita Rawlings finally answered. "Please," she begged with tears in her voice, "don't disturb the peace of two wonderfully happy children who have adapted successfully to a new family and new lives."

  "They are blood-related to me, Mrs. Rawlings! They were mine long before they were yours!"

  "Please, please," she begged. "I know you love them. I remember very well how you looked that day when we took them away, and I do understand how you must feel. When first they came to live with us, it was you they were always crying for. But they haven't cried for you in more than two years. They call me Mother or Mommy now, and they call my husband Daddy. They are fine, mentally and physically . . . I'll send you photographs, health and school reports, but please, I beg of you, don't come to remind them of all the hardships they had to endure when they lived in that pitiful shack in the Willies."